Visual Studio 2010 momentum

Since we launched Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 on April 12th of this year, it has been exciting to see the extremely positive response to the product. Within six months of the launch date, Visual Studio 2010 usage surpassed all other previous versions of Visual Studio based on usage data collected from customers who opted into sharing their usage data with us. This is the fastest adoption of a new release of Visual Studio ever, and we are seeing continued strength in the adoption of Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010, we've been working to address high priority issues you've brought to our attention through forums like Visual Studio Connect. We've also focused on improving the overall experience in a few important areas, such as unit testing, support for GPU acceleration in C++ applications, and offline help. You can learn more about the work we've done in SP1 on Jason Zander's blog.

Today, MSDN subscribers can download and install the beta of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 from this site. If you're not an MSDN subscriber, the download will be available on Thursday, December 9thhere. I encourage you to download it and try it out.

Your feedback on this release will help us improve the final release. Please report any issues you come across in the SP1 Beta to Visual Studio Connect. Once you've had a chance to use Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, please also give us your feedback by taking the Service Pack 1 Beta Survey. The results from this survey inform our work so we build an even better SP1 RTM.

Also available today for MSDN subscribers is Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack Beta. This feature pack enables sharing project status and resource availability between team members using TFS and Project Server. The feature pack beta's "go-live" license allows customers to deploy it in their production environments. You can learn more about the feature pack on Brian Harry's blog or download the feature pack beta from MSDN.